I decided to promote her to lady’s maid and find another housemaid. I liked Grace, who was hardworking and fastidious, seeming determined to make the best of a grim life: she’d been a servant since being orphaned at eleven. I could not go on trying to dress myself, fix my own hair, and keep my increasing wardrobe in order, and having her help in these intimate ways was better than hiring a stranger. That she had no experience as a lady’s maid seemed a plus; she would not be judging me against others with more experience at being a lady. Grace—or North, as I had to remember to start calling her, since a lady’s maid got the dignity of a surname—produced her younger sister Jenny as a housemaid candidate. Jenny had previously been a maid of all work at a linen draper’s in Cheapside, where she had not been treated kindly, or so North confided.
Mrs. Smith’s sister, Sarah, who had come to help with dinner party preparations, stayed on as housemaid–kitchen maid. The two new manservants, Robert, the footman, and Wilcox, in charge of the carriage and our horses, settled into an uncomfortable détente with Jencks. He was now the head male servant, in theory primarily the butler, but focusing most on his secondary job as Liam’s valet, leaving the domestic void to be filled by handsome Robert. I was fond of Robert and averse to Jencks, whom I suspected of listening at doors and was certain did not like me. The way he looked, or more often avoided looking, at me, his tone of voice: everything declared me lesser, while with Liam he was respectful and attentive to the point of being servile.
Eight servants, about right for the sort of people we were pretending to be, was a lot. Employing them was like running a small business where the workers never went home. And if there had been little privacy before, now there was none. To talk without fear of being overheard, Liam and I had to speak in whispers, go out for a walk, or take the carriage: to Hyde Park or farther, up toward Hampstead Heath, where London plunged into country. The house was ours but not ours, and sometimes I missed the informality and disarray of our three-servant days, which already seemed to belong to a lost past.
THE DINNER HAD BEEN A SUCCESS, OR SO I HAD THOUGHT, UNTIL Henry Austen dropped out of sight. Before it, he had asked us to tea since his own dinner and had accompanied Liam to Tattersalls to advise him on horse buying, in addition to the memorable afternoon he had dropped by with Pride and Prejudice. After, he accepted an invitation to tea and then retracted in a polite letter pleading unexpected bank business that sent him out of town. In that letter, he promised to come and see us soon. He didn’t.
Since I knew that he would soon contract a mysterious ailment that would incapacitate him for weeks, I began to wonder if he was already sick. Or had we done something wrong, violated some subtle politeness rule? There was no one to ask, and nothing to do but wait; since he had promised to come see us, it seemed a breach of etiquette to go see him first, or so we feared. I reminded myself of a character in a Jane Austen novel, Anne Elliot perhaps, divided from the person I most needed to see, reliant on chance or the actions of others to bring us together. We drank tea at the Jacksons’, went for drives in the park, and never ran into Henry Austen. I visited Mrs. Tilson as late in the day as politeness allowed, hoping I might see him coming home from work, but I didn’t. I made a point of going shopping on Henrietta Street near Covent Garden, the location of his bank; nothing.
We had made so much progress in 1815, but now all forward motion seemed to halt, and I am not good at waiting.
CHAPTER 5
OCTOBER 16
33 Hill Street
ONE MORNING SO FOGGY THAT THE WORLD OUTSIDE WAS JUST misty suggestion, we were at breakfast when Jencks brought in a letter from Henry Austen.
“We’re supposed to talk about that investment today,” Liam said, snapping the seal. “I hope he’s not canceling.”
“Wait. You were supposed to see him? You never said.”
“I was sure I had.” I was sure he hadn’t. Liam was reading. “He won’t be at the bank. He’s ill.” He handed me the letter.
I scanned it, hoping for a symptom, anything. But it took half a page of beautiful handwriting and elaborate phrasing to convey what Liam had said in two sentences.
“We’ll go see him anyway, though.”
“He’s ill.”
“That’s why we’re going.” Maybe I’d had too much coffee, but I was vibrating with impatience, a sense of things undone. That the cold damp had kept me indoors for days didn’t help. “You’re a doctor. You’re his friend. You want to help.” We were speaking as ourselves, barely audible, heads together across the table. “That was our guidance. We need to go there.”
Liam drew himself up and looked at me. “I meant, I’ll go. But not you.”
I felt a flash of annoyance, though he was right. I was not the doctor here, and nondoctors did not pay social visits to ill acquaintances. I knew all this; just as I knew what the Project Team’s instructions were at this stage of the mission.
It was annoying, however, that my first news of this meeting with Henry came in the letter that canceled it. I’d been sitting around for days, puzzling over his absence, while Liam had known something he’d not bothered to tell me. There is a point where reticence starts to feel hostile. It was not just his unwillingness to talk about himself, but also the way he seemed able to produce a new personality on demand, like that first night at Henry’s. How he’d implied being Old British but wasn’t. He was an actor, or former actor, so maybe I should expect layers of deception. Yet I didn’t like it; as his colleague, I deserved a better sense of the person under the act.
“Right, that’s what I meant,” I said at last. “Just try to notice everything for me. The color of his skin. Ask him about his appetite and the state of his bowels. If he has eaten anything unusual. Check for fever. Listen to his pulse.”
And maybe that was another problem. Liam had done a good job impersonating a gentleman of the era, but could he go into a sick man’s bedroom and convincingly play a doctor?
People in 1815 knew almost nothing about illness or the human body, so impersonating a physician should be just a matter of looking thoughtful, a little chin stroking, dropping a few relevant phrases in Latin or Greek—as gentlemen, doctors had classical educations. We had learned about the state of medicine at the time, about the humors, the lingering influence of Galen. In theory, Liam was perfectly trained for this stage of our mission; he just had to act doctorly and wait for Henry to recover, as he eventually would.
Which was also troubling: to know that he was going to get very sick and that I would not be allowed to do anything to relieve his suffering.
Liam, who’d started eating ham with a provoking calmness, failed to reply. “You’ll remember all that?” I demanded.
“I will.”
“Say it back to me.”
He poured himself more coffee. “Skin color. Appetite. Bowels. What he has eaten. Fever. Pulse.”
“And palpate his abdomen, if you get the chance.” Physicians, as gentlemen, were not supposed to touch their patients; using your hands was like work, not genteel. Some more modern members of the profession were starting to challenge this idea, though the real scientific revolution in medicine was just barely getting going.
Liam shot me a look that might have been amused. “I doubt we will achieve that level of intimacy today.”
“Something to keep in mind, though.”
“And what should an abdomen feel like?”
“Anything out of the ordinary,” I said, repressing a sigh. Would it have killed the Project Team to find a doctor with an acting background? “Masses. Tenderness. When you percuss, dullness where would you expect—”